14 Irish Philosophical Journal
productive exchange with technology. We could for once learn to set
limits to technology: for instance, by refraining from wanting to make
everything we are technologically able to make. Just consider the task
of stopping the armaments race: it is clear that the demand for
limitations demands something like <3 new and different kind of person.
And philosophy has always been connected with the hope of awakening
4
consciousness of the necessity to find new ways in times of crisis.
NOTES
The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.E. Yeats, edited by P. AIt
J.
and R.K. Alspach, third edition (New York, 1966), pp. 161,808-811.
Paul Celan, Von ｓ｣ｨｾｬ･Ｑ＠ zu Schwelle (Stuttgart, 1955), p. 22.
2.
On 'new mythology', Hegel, Schopenhauer, Heidegger and Celan,
3.
see my book, Die Frage nach der Kunst: Von Hegel zu Heidegger
(Freiburg and Munich, 1984). Concerning the difference between
Becker and a philosophy of art in the manner of Heidegger and
Gadamer, see my book, Heidegger und die hermeneutische
Philosophie (Freiburg and Munich, 1983), pp. 365-388. See also my
book, Martin Heidegger's Path of Think.iJ:J.g (Atlantic Highlands,
1985).
I should like to thank Christopher Martin Fry for reading through
4.
the manuscript of this article.
HEIDEGGER'S PHENOMENOLOGY
AND THE DESTRUCTION OF REASON
DERMOT MORAN
(St Patrick's College Maynooth)
I Irrationalism and Phenomenology
In his long study of the emergence of the cult of irrationalism in
::uropean culture since the eighteenth century, Lukacs defends the
,::ossibility of an objective, explanatory science of the human condition
dialectical Marxism) against the pervading irrationalistic philosophical
:endencies of the past two centuries--tendencies which he seeks to
explain in terms of the Angst and dilemma of individualistic bourgeois
ｾＬｵｭ｡ｮｩｴｹ＠ in the era of high capitalism) Lukacs begins with the
?omantic writer Schelling, who made intellectual intuition the linchpin
2£ his system, and continues through Nietzsche and Kierkegaard to
ｾ･ｩ､ｧｲＬ＠ and then to fully-fledged Nazi thinkers like Junger, Krieck
2Sld Rosenberg. Lukacs considers Heidegger's emphasis on
［ＺｾＱ･ｮｯｭｬｧｩ｣｡＠ 'essential intuition' to be dangerous, because due to its
'irrationalistic arbitrariness anything at all can be brought about'.2 Sein
::.::d Zeit, then, with its emphasis on the silent call of care (Sorge), the
'"':'oment of insight (Augenblick) and decision, and its demand for
3uThenticity, is seen as an expression of the Zeitgeist, as a mere
:£:bensphilosophie, a 'vitalism' which includes an 'abstract and
-nhicising anthropology') In short it represents an extreme form of
｟ｾ｣ｲｩｴ｡ｬＬ＠ arbitrary subjectivism.
In the Jargon of Authenticity and in Negative Dialectics, T. Adorno
• 35 continued this CrItIque, arguing that Heidegger's thought
2<:commodated itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires
., resist that goal'. 4 Authent icity which has no cr it ical moment is no
'ere than an immediate submission to authoritarianism. Heidegger's
-'isticism, says Adorno, is a threat to the establishment of a rational
;ocial order. In his recently translated work, Against Epistemology,
dorno draws Husserl (and by implication all phenomenology) into the
:<>ck to stand trial with Heidegger for abdicating philosophy's rule of
'eason in favour of a nostalgia for origins and for the uncritical
:",'scription of what is dogmatically given, that is, of the status quo.5
::Ox Adorno then, phenomenology (Husserlian and Heideggerean) has been
volved in a destruction of reason.
15
16 Irish Philosophical Journal
Heidegger would probably not object to the label of 'destroyer of
reason' (though Husser! would be quite upset!). In Sein und zeit (Being
and Tim e) (J 927) and ever since, he has repudiated what he calls
'rationalism' and also thinking which is based on logic. 6 He rejects the
definition of man as a rational animal.? He also rejects the one-track
thinking which has become universal in the technological world with its
deracinated pursuit of reason as ratio, a form of analysis, measuring and
balancing, which is directed towards a goal and wishes to achieve results,
which is guided by rules, and which in the last analysis claims to be
universal, self-grounding, self-sufficient and comprehensive. Heidegger
does want to destroy (or 'deconstruct') the edifice of reason, which he
feels has emerged not just from the Enlightenment but from the ancient
Greeks, and which has been determining western civilization since then.
However, Heidegger equally repudiates irrationalism, even as early
as Being and Time, including all forms of mystical intuitionism and
ecstatic unity with being. Far from being the most extreme form of
individualist subjectivism, his thinking is at the opposite pole from
subjectivism. It is also opposed to arbitrariness, 'freefloating results',8
and emotionalism. For Heidegger phenomenology was a possibility (SZ,
38), a way (SZ, 436-437) (with a strong emphasis on the 'openness'
inherent in those words) of avoiding both rationalism and subjectivism, of
<,voiding speculative metaphysics as well as deracinated, analytical
ratiocination. The problem of reason is central to his thought, and
especially what he takes to be its two highest poles--the Principle of
Identity and the Principle of Sufficient Reason. In providing a critique
of this kind of Leibnizean rationalism, Heidegger hopes to free western
thought from its 'logocentrism' and open it up towards the mystery of
being. But can it scarcely be possible that such a thinker could be
charged with irrationalism (a term he feels is outmoded and defunct
anyway), especially when so many of the critical theorists of the
Frankfurt school owe their critique of technological reason to
Heidegger? That old quarrel seems to be trapped within the two poles of
Enlightenment and Romanticism, as Gadamer and Ricoeur would label
them, between critical reason and inspired intuition. Heidegger's
thinking lies totally outside of these poles and offers a new approach to
the problem of the relationship between phenomenology and reason. This
article will explore this new approach.
First, I'd like briefly to point out that 'traditional'
phenomenologists--Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty--have operated within
two paradigms of reason which derive from Kant and Hegel. These
paradigms remain unquestioned and unreduced in their writings--even in
Merleau-Ponty who claims to be tracing the line of constituting reason
as opposed to constituted reason.
Second, I would like to argue that Heidegger is the first
phenomenologist to become fully aware of the problems of this
unreduced reason. operative in phenomenology, and that he himself
Heidegger's Phenomenology 17
2ttempts a reduction of it, in so doing of course changing the nature of
:he reduction itself. In later writings he recognizes more explicitly the
lClterconnection of language and reasoning. He seeks to save the pure
;)ossibility of phenomenology from the practice of analytic, rationalistic
:escription which accompanied essential intuition and prevented the
..:nprejudiced showing of the phenomenon. From the beginning Heidegger
"oad moved away from the cognitive model of intentionality and from the
structure of transcendental suhjectivity which supported Husserl's
phenomenological reductions, emphasizing more the being-in-the-wor1c1
of humans as their horizon.
Later he moved to even question the nature of the horizon of the
world itself and to ask how the world 'worlds', a question which pushed
'lim to the limit of language. This new recognition produced another
thinking, which Heidegger calls variously other thinking
Anderesdenken ), meditative commemorative thinking (Andenken ), or
just simply thought (Denken) which many people see--including
Richardson9 --as a reversal or turning away (Kehre ) from phenomenology
wwards poetic thinking, my tho-poetic reasoning, or just simply towards
silence.
would like to argue more in line with recent French
oommentators of Heidegger--Iike Beaufret, Fedier, Greisch--tha t
Yeidegger never renounces phenomenology.1O Indeed, the very fact that
he reissued so many of his early works on phenomenology unchanged
points in this direction. Heidegger remains from first to last a
ohenomenologist and never renounces his belief that phenomenology is
the key to ontology; that is, that a certain pathway arrives at being;
that, in the old language, consciousness and its object, ens, can be one.
Other thinking and meditative silence are in fact the most essential
::rimordial phenomena to be studied. They release us from the trap of
:hought imprisoned in language to allow access to the truth of being.
The true task of reason and of language in so far as we can use these
,l,"ords at all is to recognize the being of the silence and of the openness
',c'lich founds reason and language. Heidegger moves far beyond
'''"'usserl's belief that all conscious acts are intentional to place emphasis
':"' the absolutely originary, non-intentional act of meditative silence,
.vhich simply waits, and does not will.
In other words, the new view of reason Heidegger possesses belongs
:0 his retrieval of the essence of phenomenological awareness. As
;';eidegger himself says in 'My Way to Phenomenology' (1963):
The age of phenomenological philosophy seems to be
over •••• But in what is most its own phenomenology is not a
school. It is the possibility of thinking, at times changing
and only thus persisting, of corresponding to the claim of
what is to be thought. If phenomenology is thus experienced
and retained, it can disappear as a designation in favour' of

18 Irish Philosophical Journal
the matter of thinking whose manifestness remains a
mystery.
'Supplement' (1969):
In the sense of the last sentence one can already read in
Being and Time, pp. 62-63: 'its essential character does not
consist in being actual as a philosophical school. Higher
than actuality stands possibility. The comprehension of
phenomenology consists solely in grasping it as possibility'. I I
Thus Heidegger, in proposing a new model of reason, is also proposing a
new model of phenomenology.
II Reason in Traditional Phenomenology
I will rehearse briefly the pOSitIOn of reason in traditional
phenomenology, to set the problem in context.
A. Dialectical Reason in Phenomenology
Curiously, phenomenology has had very little to say on the problem
of the essence or nature of reason. This is an extraordinary omission
given the origin of phenomenology in the Kantian critique of pure reason
and, of course, the first fully-extended description of the struggle of
reason to arrive at full consciousness of itself in Hegel's Phenomenology
of Spirit. Heidegger recognized the worth of Hegel's Phenomenology (as
did Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) as genuine phenomenology: that is as the
description of the appearance of phenomena in the manner of their
appearance. All adopted its central insight that, as Levinas put it,12
there is a strict correlation between the intelligible object and the
psychical modality in which it is apprehended. Or in other words: not
just any meaning is accessible to any thought.
In Hegel, dialectical thinking tries to link these apprehensions of
meaning into a complex, ascending order of awarenesses of increasingly
wider comprehension without loss of concreteness or immediacy, until
thought has developed a concept adequate to its object. Later
phenomenology does not deny Hegel's insight that these levels of
awareness were interconnected. It does, however, take issue with the
speculative structure of their arrangement. Yet even here, Sartre, for
example, does not take issue with the major ways in which two
awarenesses resemble and are related to each other: namely, that they
either miror and are transformed into each other or that they negate and
contradict each other. Sartre, in the Critique of Dialectical Reason,
thinks this out in great and subtle detail, but he never ceases to hold to
phenomenology's desire for the concrete experience even if now he seeks
to discover there, as he says in Search for a Method, 'concrete
syntheses ... within a moving dialectical totalisation which is nothing else
Heidegger's Phenomenology 19
but history, ••• for truth is somethin¥ which becomes, ... it is a totalisation
which is forever being totalised'. 3 Sartre's reason then is Hegelian
reason without the Absolute Subject, without the totaliser.
What is reason for Merleau-Ponty? Although Merleau-Ponty
rejected Hegel's metaphysical theses on the existence of Absolute Mind
or Spirit, he does hold onto the idea of a meaningful, historical,
dialectical process between human beings and the world, which it is the
business of philosophy to trace. He holds onto the overall moment of
reason while relativizing it. Reason is the temporal flux of the world,
and the world is 'primary embodiment of rationality' (p. xxi).
This famous passage in the Preface to the Phenomenology of
Perception is usually regarded as a classic statement of
phenomenological method:
Because we are in the world we are condemned to meaning
and we cannot do or say anything without it acquiring a
name in history. Probably the chief gain from
phenomenology is to have united extreme subjectivism and
extreme objectivism in its notion of the world or of
rationality. Rationality is precisely measured by the
experiences in which it is disclosed. To say that there exists
rationality is to say that perspectives blend, perceptions
confirm each other, a meaning emerges. But it should not
be set in a realm apart, transposed into absolute Spirit or
into a world in a realist sense. The phenomenological world
is not pure being but the sense which is revealed when the
paths of my various experiences intersect ....
Or again:
Philosophy is not the reflection of pre-existent truth but,
like art, the act of bringing truth into being. One may well
ask how this creation is possible and if it does not recapture
in things a pre-existent reason. The answer is that the only
pre-existent Logos is the world itself and that the
philosophy which brings it into visible existence does not
begin by making it possible; it is actual or real like the
world of which it is a part and no explanatory hypothesis is
clearer than the act whereby we take up the unfinished
world in an effort to complete it or conceive it. Rationality
is not a problem.l 4
When we look closer, we see that Merleau-Ponty holds to an
c:-lcritical idea of the unity of the world, and continually refers to the
ｾＢＧＡｪｱｵ･ｮｳ＠ of the world. Rationality for him is the floating structure
:::[Oduced by the interrelation of this world with human subjectivity. The
-':-lity produced is, as he says, the focus of rationality. I quote again:
20 Irish Philosophical Journal
But it will be asked if the unity of the world is not based on
that of consciousness and if the world is not the outcome of
a constituting effort, how does it come about that
appearances accord with each other and group themselves
into things, ideas and truths? .. Why does my life succeed in
drawing itself together in order to project itself in words,
intentions and acts? This is the problem of rationality. The
reader is aware that, on the whole, classical thought tries to
explain the concordances in question in terms of a world in
itself or in terms of an absolute mind. Such explanations
borrow all the force thev can from the phenomenon of
rationality and therefore fail to explain it. Absolute
thought is no clearer to me than my own finite mind, since
it is through the latter that I conceive of the former. \V e
are in the world which means that things take shape, an
immense individual asserts itself, each existence is
self-comprehensive and comprehensive of the rest. All that
has to be done is to recognise these phenomena which are
the ground of all our certainties. The belief in an absolute
mind or in a world in itself detached from us is no more than
a rationalisation of that primordial faith.l 5
Although this is meant as a clear refutation of Hegel, the very terms of
the discussion are deeply Hegelian, and his attempt to chart the
meaningful history of humans in the world becomes more and more
Hegelian in his later essays. In Sartre's words, history is a totalization
without a totalizer, dialectical rationality charts the sequence of these
totaJizations while avoiding the scholasticism of the totality. This view
of reason as the process of coming to meaning in history is very common
in phenomenology but it so far lacks a phenomenological reduction and
tends to confirm the view that phenomenology is a neo-Hegelian
development with the excesses of absolute spirit removed. I give
Merleau-Ponty as an illustration because he is often held to be close to
the original Husser! in intention (closer, certainly, to the unpublished
working notes of Husser!).
B. Reason Based on Intuition
Apart from this dialectical conception of reason the other main
view of reason operative in mainstream phenomenology is really a
development of Cartesian reason or Kantian reason which is built on the
twin pillars of intuition and judgement.l 6 Husser! and his followers
believe that intuition is the basis of every rational assertion,17 and
Husser! believes the main problem is to discover the kinds of intuition
which lead to certain judgements which constitute genuine knowldege,
even if these intuitions--in the later writings such as Experience and
8 linguistic structuring of our first experience of the world
Judgment--belong to the pre-predicative level.l
Husserl bases everything on intuition and thus reason is seen as in
the Cartesian model to depend on clear and distinct certain (or
Heidegger's Phenomenology 21
apodictic) intuitions. Thus, Husserl's famous principle of all principles,
in ]fieas (Section 24-), which Heidegger singles out for comment in a late
essay, 'The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking', 19 states:
The very primordial dator (or presentive) intuition is a
source of authority (Rechtque11.e) for knowledge, •.• whatever
presents itself in intuition in primordial form (as it were in
its bodily reality) is simply to be accepted as it gives itself
out to be, though only within the limits in which it then
presents itself.
Here Husserl is making a stand against the common types of a priori or
speculative reasoning as well as against a very narrow positivistic
empir icism. His emphasis on intuition, however, though laudable, fell
into some common traps--particularly in relation to language and the
role of language in shaping the emergence of intuitions. Derrida
criticizes Husser! for making the logical the paradigm of all language
and of all thinking. Derrida says, in his Speech and Phenomena:
As Fink has shown, Husserl never raised the question of the
transcendental logos, the inherited Janguage in which
phenomenology produces and exhibits the results of its
reductive operations. The unity of ordinary language (or the
language of traditional metaphysics) and the language of
phenomenology is never broken in spite of the precautions,
the 'brackets', the renovations or innovations. 20
This is because, as Derrida goes on to say:
Being interested in language only within the compass of
rationality determining the logos from logic, Husser! had, in
a most traditional manner, determined the essence of
language by taking the logical as its telos or aim. 2l
Rationality and the sphere of logic seem more or less co-extensive for
Husserl so that his intuitions look less comprehensively meaningful than
they initially proposed to be.
Furthermore there is the ever-present danger, articulated by
Gadamer in the second supplement of Truth and Method, that the
following question can be asked:
... whether there may not be hidden in our experience of the
world a primordial falsity; whether, in our linguistically
transmitted experience, we may not be prey to prejudices
or, worse still, to necessities which have their source in the
and which would force us to run with open eyes, as it were,
down a path whence there was no other issue than
destruction. 22
22 Irish Philosophical Journal Heidegger's Phenomenology 23

By ignoring the hold that language has on our thought we are doing more,
dialectic comes to see substance as subject, for Husserl his principle of
according to Gadamer, than making a philosophical mistake. We are all principles is grounded in transcendental subjectivity.
threatening our very existence on the planet. 'If we continue thus we
can predict ••• with certainty the fact that life on this planet will become In this ＱＹＶｾ＠
essay, Heidegger is concerned--as he was in 1927 in
impossible'. He goes on: Being and Time (Section 7}--to characterize phenomenology in terms of
the slogan 'to the things themselves', 'zu den Sachen selbst'. Here he
And so behind this there lurks the uneasy question whether,
takes die Sache to mean the matter of philosophy--that with which
in all our thought, even in the critical dissolution of such philosophy is ultimately concerned. It iS for Heidegger, Plato's to
metaphysical concepts as substance, accident, the subject pragma auto in the Seventh Letter ＳｾｉｃＷＮＲ＠ 5 Heidegger feels that what
and its properties and the like, predicative logic included, matters for thinking is its matter, to think what thinking should be
we are doing any more than thinking through to its about, what determines thinking. He feels that for Hegel and for Husserl
conclusion that which made itself into the linguistic what philosophy is about is subjectivity.
structure of the Indo-Germanic peoples millennia before any
written tradition. We raise this question today just when we Hegel's speculative dialectic is the movement in which the
are at the end of our linguistic culture--an era heralded by matter as such comes to itself, comes to its own presence.
technological civilisation and its mathematical Husserl's method is supposed to bring the matter of
symbolisms.... We have reached the point where we must philosophy to its ultimately originary givenness, that
ask what the determining factor is.... [Heidegger] has means: to its own presence. The two methods are as
taught us to see that Greek metaphysics is the beginning of different as they could possibly be. But the matter as such
modern technology.... Is our western exper ience an which they are to present is the same, although it is
insurmountable barrier? 23 experienced in different ways.26
I have been carried beyond Husserl's emphasis on intuition as the Heidegger feels that both approaches leave something unthought: the
foundation of rationality to raise the spectre that perhaps this intuition nature of rationality itself--although that is not Heidegger's word. What
as moulded by language does not necessarily exclude bias and distortion. is left out--in Heidegger's dense formulation--is the openness (Lichtung)
This, of course, has been the theme of the most recent phenomenological which is presupposed by all coming to light, whether it be in the Hegelian
developments in Ricoeur, Derrida, Gadamer and Habermas. But in so far way or the Husserlian. This openness is presupposed by the Hegelian play
as they have been carried far beyond the original methodology of of coming to presence of the phenomena:
phenomenology 1 propose to leave them out of account. Furthermore I
believe--despite objections from Habermas, for example--that they owe Speculative dialectic is a mode in which the matter of
their being to Heidegger and that in so far as his thinking has not been philosophy comes to appeal of itself and for itself and thus
thought through, their critique of reason is not fully comprehensible. becomes presence. Such appearance necessarily occurs in
some light.... But brightness in turn rests on something
III Heidegger and Reason open, something free which might illuminate it.... Only this
openness grants to s::r:eculative thinking the passage through
Thus far we have two common views of rationality in that which it thinks. 7
phenomenology--neither making rationality the central problem: the one
Hegelian which sees in reason a complicated movement of meaning Again:
which is always totalizing and encompassing its opposite, a reason which
is responsive to the world which has a history; and on the other side the But light never first creates openness. Rather light
intuitive narrower view of reason as essentially a logical process founded presupposes openness.
on certain intuitions, whose nature it is phenomenology's function to
clarify. And:

I mention these two together because Heidegger is concerned with It is necessary for thinking to become explicitly aware of
and takes issue with both forms of reason, the Hegelian and the the matter called opening here. We are not extracting mere
Husserlian. In his essay The End of philosophy and the Task of Thinking, notions from mere words, e.g. opening, as it might appear on
he sees both types of thinking--the one he calls 'speculative-dialectical the surface.... What the word designates in the connection
thinking' and the other 'ordinary intuition'--as concerned with we are now thinking, free openness, is a primal
subjectivity. 24 Heidegger shows that for Hegel the phenomenon ••• we would have to say primal matter. 28

21t Irish Philosophical Journal
He goes on to claim that this thinking of openness may be the
phenomenon which must first of all be understood:
The phenomenon itself, in this case the opening, sets us the
task of learning from it while questioning it, that is, of
letting it say something to us.2 9
Heidegger is redefining the aim and method of phenomenology, and with
it the task of thinking and the meaning of rationality. He is staying with
the old Hegelian and Husserlian slogan of 'to things themselves', but the
matter, now, is that which gives openness for thought, which allows
everything to appear and which folds everything into itself.
Heidegger is never interested in simply investigating methods or
techniques of reasoning or thinking; he even cites Kant and Hegel as
having recognized that such thinking about thinking must inevitably end
in failure. Nor does he want to criticize thinking, he wants instead to go
to the root of his own thinking, to find its ursprung, its origin. This he
does by offering an 'immanent critique' ,30 as he calls it, of Sein und
Zeit. He wants to find the matter which gives rise to his thinking at that
time and which still guides it in advance.
Too often critics have concentrated on the word being and assumed
that Heidegger wrote Being and Time based on his phenomenologically
purified intuition of being. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Heidegger's essay, sein und zeit, never gets to being. It is concerned
rather with the absence of being from our thinking. It proposes a way of
destroying or destructuring our thinking so that the memory of an
original awakening which took place in ancient Greece can be
recollected, so that it may be understood. Once this is understood it
becomes possible to see clearlv the unity of Heidegger's entire work (a
unity which can easily be seen by examining early texts written soon
after Being and Time such as What is Metaphysics or The Essence of
Reason.=; where the absence of being or a kind of non-being dominates
the thinking).
If we want to understand Heidegger's work Being and Time, we
must recall to ourselves what he said later many times in regard to his
theological beginnings. Heidegger was puzzled initially by the problem
of articulating the right word, the meaningful word. His aim in his
theological studies had been 'to seek the Word which is able to call one
to faith and preserve one in faith' ,31 or as he put it in unterwegs zur
Sprache, 'the relation between the Word of Sacred Scripture and
theological-speculative thinking,)2 He was searching for the correct
relation between his thinking and the word. This he felt was given to
him in phenomenology, although he reported having a continuous
difficulty in reading Husser! which, as he says, 'concerned the simple
question of how thinking's manner of procedure which called itself
phenomenology was to be carried out·)3 He actually solved his problem
by an encounter with language--the Greek language and especially the
Heidegger's Phenomenology 2.5
manner in which the Greeks used the word alet::heia, as he recounted:
What occurs for the phenomenology of the acts of
consciousness as the self-manifestation of phenomena was
thought more originally by Aristotle and in all Greek
thinking and existence as aletheia, as the unconcealedness
of what is present, its being revealed, its showing itself)1t
Meditation on the etymology of the word, phenomenology, was able to
reveal to Heidegger both the essence of phenomenology and the manner
through which it would proceed, as well as--though much later--the
meaning of the matter which phenomenology would clarify.
In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger proclaims the importance of
understanding the word, which gives itself from out of its original
oneness with what it names. Thus he says in Section lflf (SZ, 220):
The ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force
of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses
itself and to keep the common understanding from levelling
them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a
source of pseudo-problems.
Part of his strategy in Being and Time was to recover the Greek
meanings of words, but part of his strategy was to invent new
terminology. Later he felt that this latter half of his strategy had been
mistaken and now he kept only with the first part--to remember or to
recover older hidden meanings. As he says in his letter to Richardson,
what was necessary was not 'the invention of new terms but rather a
return to the originary content of our own language which is always in
process of dying away,)5 Thus he now investigated both the German
and the Greek languages (omitting the Hebraic and other important
influences on European culture, as critics like Levinas and Ricoeur have
noted).
Heidegger's actual interpretations of words like phenomenology or
alet::heia or logos are familiar to everyone and 1 need not repeat them
here. What 1 want to do is to look closer at Heidegger's operating
procedure: how he learns from language, how his thinking is concerned
with words--that is, with the matter of thinking itself.
The emphasis on finding the word which awakened thought (in the
Heideggerean sense) is what brought Heidegger to phenomenology.
Actually the words are already there, it is not a question of inventing a
new language--the language already exists. Already there exists an
original unity between thinking and being, it exists in language, in the
logos. Although this seems to be perfectly clear its implications have
been missed by many Heidegger commentators. The original
intuition--the phenomenologically grounded intuition on which Heidegger
will base his thought--is the intuition already contained in the
appropriateness of language for the world. What Heidegger seeks to

26 Irish Philosophical Journal
uncover then is ｴｨｩｾ＠ event of appropriation (Ereignis) which first set
language into motion.
Now Heidegger can be somewhat confusing at this point. He
speaks as if this event took place in the past, among the early Greeks
and in Heraclitus in particular, for it was Heraclitus who spoke of logos
and phusis as one. It was the early Greeks who experienced true saying,
the original saying of the \.vord which made manifest what was hidden. In
Was heisst Denken?, he even states that the original logos was one with
the m uthos until Plato separated them. !1 uthos, he says, is 'what has its
essence in its telling--what appears in the unconcealedness of its
appeal,.36 Its primal concern is with a memory of the original event of
the unity of language and being.
Now the main problem here is not that Heidegger is saying that
Western rationality is originally one with myth (Cornford, Cassirer and
others have known this) but that this original event should he recoverable
now. After all, the world of the Greeks has decayed or withdrawn. But
I-Ieidegger always claims that language preserves its origin, in fact that
it has no other being than that which it derives from its origin.
As he says in Sein und Zeit (Section 6), talking about his
understanding of the destruction:
We understand the task as one in which ... we are to destroy
the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive
at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our
first ways of determining the nature of being--the ways
which have guided us ever since)7
The Greek intuition is concealed in the nature of language, in fact
actually is the nature of language; language would have no being without
it. Later in his essay 'The Turning' (Die Kehre), answering the question
'how must we think?', he says:
Language gives to every purposeful deliberation its ways and
byways. Without language there would be lacking to every
doing every dimension in which it could bestir itself.... In
view of this language is never primarily the expression of
thinking, feeling and willing. Language is the primal
dimension within which man's essence is first able to
correspond at all to beinl and its claim.... This primal
corresponding is thinking)
Going back to the Greek essence of language doesn't involve going back
in time, getting involved in historiography or whatever,39 it doesn't
involve turning back the clock. It actually involves having a new
experience of time, where linear sequential clock time no longer
applies. The essence of time is so involved with the essence of language
that a definite alteration in the temporal sense occurs when this kind of
Heidegger's Phenomenology 27
linguistic meditation is performed. This was only vaguely felt by
Heidegger at the time of Sein und Zeit, but by the time we have corne to
his radio talk on Zeit und Sein the temporal dimension of speaking has
become uppermost. Here he says that what determines both time anrl
being is their belonging together, the Ereignis. Thinking
phenomenologically he is saying that there is at the root of experience
an original upsurge which gives both time and being their 'space' and
'location' (note the imagery).
In the essay 'The End of Philosophy', which I take to be crucial for
the understanding of the later Heidegger, he says explicitly:
We may suggest that the day will corne when we will not
shun the question whether the opening, the free open, may
not be that within which alone pure space and ecstatic time
and everything present and absent in them have the place
which gathers and protects everything. 40
Traditional philosophy, he says, knows nothing of this opening although it
thinks in the open. 'Philosophy does speak about the light of reason, but
does not heed the opening of being,.41
The original intuition of the Greeks then can be experienced, as
can the modern understanding with its rationality, because they are both
dependent on the open. But further the opening itself can be
experienced. This is the subject of one of Heidegger's most difficult
pieces, the 'Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking' in
Gelassenheit. 42 Here he describes how it is possible for thought to reach
the Open.
IV Meditative Thinking and Openness
Openness, the site of language and of being, can only be reached hy
attending to a different kind of thinking from our everyday reason,
calculation and inferential ratiocination. It is not, however, a privileged
experience in the sense that it is restricted to the few, the enlightened
or the mystic. Openness is by its very name something which all human
beings have access to all the time, although they do not know this and do
not focus their attention on it. Meditative thinking is the kind of
thinking which seeks to experience openness fully.
To achieve meditative thought we move completely outside the
domain of science in all its forms. Science does not think, Heidegger
says in Was heisst ｄ･ｮｫｾＳ＠ In fact he explicitly says that an
unbridgeable gulf separates science from thinking, a gulf that requires a
leap in order to cross it. The whole area of rationality and its
structuring must be abandoned. Thus meditative thought is not a
technique or an instrument to gain access or mastery over an object. In
28 Ir ish Ph ilosoph ical Journal
a certain sense it has no steps, or none that Heidegger wishes to
enumerate. I am not at all sure that it involves discursive thought at
all. Meditative thinking breaks with the Husserlian and
phenomenological rule that all conscious acts are intentional, have a
content. Heidegger's description of meditative thinking implies that it
'lets go' of or becomes disinterested in objects in order to come into a
more direct relation with the act of thinking itself. This does not mean
making thought subject to its own self-conscious scrutiny, as it means
for Descartes and Husserl, rather it means loosening the grip which the
ego has over thinking. Meditative thinking becomes aware of itself only
to become more aware of its ground--which is really an Abgrund, an
abyss, original openness. In other words such thinking is not seeking its
first principle in the Aristotelian or scholastic sense, the sense of
metaphysics; it rather is experiencing the actual movement of
manifestation itself, its process. It is quite the reverse of speculative
thinking. As far as I can understand from reading Ge1assenheit and the
Der Spiegel interview 44 and many of Heidegger's latest texts,
meditative thinking first becomes aware of the background or horizon of
thinking in order then to recognize that horizons are limitations to the
experiencing of the true unlimited, the unbounded (apeiron), the anarchic
(in the original Greek sense), the open. This open lies beyond the
horizon, as it were. That is, it lies beyond all intellectual figuration and
structuring, outside all ideological direction; it is an experience of pure
knowing.
We can experience this phenomenologically. We do so not when we
pay attention to intentional acts and intuit essences but when we remove
the sense of orientation and directedness from our attention. Husser!, in
J11eas and elsewhere, distinguished the general phenomenon of the
'turning to',45 or directedness of attention, from intentionality in a
stricter sense, which is a positing of meaning even in non-directed acts
like silence or pausing or so on. Heidegger is going much further in
positing a thinking which is outside of all willing and also outside of
'spontaneity', as he says Kant characterized thinking. It begins by
willing to renounce willing, but of course since this is still intentional
behaviour it must open itself further to the possibility of non-willing
altogether. This happens for Heidegger only if we put ourselves in the
right attitude (like the earlier mood in Sein und Zeit) of waitng which is
not a waiting-for. Heidegger says this waiting 'really has no object',tf6 it
is a form of consciousness or of comportment which is totally removed
from representational conceptual thinking. We must go further still than
waiting; this is still not thinking in its essential nature but is only
preparatory to thinking.
In order to get truly to the heart of the matter (die Sache) of
thinking, we need to experience Gelassenheit or letting be, or
releasement:
Gelassenheit is indeed the release of oneself from
transcendentaI representation and so a relinquishing of the
Heidegger's Phenomenology 29
willing of a horizon. Such relinquishing no longer stems
from a willing, except that the occasion for releasing
oneself to belonging to that which regions [die Gegnet]
requires a trace of willing. This trace however vanishes
while releasing oneself and is completely extinguished in
releasement [Gelassenheit]. 47
This Gelassenheit is discussed by Heidegger with explicit reference to
the thought of Meister Eckhart. It is not my intention here to develop
Eckhart's discussion of detachment or releasement; rather I am
concerned to understand 'letting be,.48 Heidegger is clearly
differentiating himself from Eckhart's view. He attributes to Eckhart
the view that one opens oneself and denies self-will in order to be open
to divine will. Heidegger wants to be more open still, it is not a matter
of letting divine will take over but rather it is a rethinking of what
Heidegger calls in Sein und Zeit the structure of resolve, that is 'the
opening of Dasein particularly undertaken by him for openness,.49
Heidegger is at pains to point out that meditative thinking does not
mean passivity or a 'will-less letting in of everything, and basically the
denial of the will to live')O As resolve it is open towards truth, towards
being and towards the openness which founds truth and being. This
thinking is rather one with the openness, one with truth itself. It steps
aside from willing or intending, and thus sets itself aside from meanings,
from concepts, from representations. It even is uninterested in the
horizons of thought. It sees the horizon as 'but the side facing us of an
openness which surrounds us', and seeks to experience the regioning of
the openness itself.
This does not mean abandoning all critical questioning. Heidegger
has not given up his privileging of the question over the judgement which
opens sein und zeit. As he says in Die Frage nach der Technik,
questioning is the piety of thought. He has simply overcome
intellectualist leanings in his understanding of human being as
questioner, and now sees the whole of human existence as a kind of
questioning advancement or proposal of the appearance of truth. In his
later writings the stress is more on the matter which comes to
humankind to be thought; that is, what gives a manifesting power to
language.
As he says in the Heraclitus Lectures for 1943-41+:
The rare and true thoughts do not arise from self-made
thinking; and they certainly do not live in things, as a stone
in a meadow or a net in water. The true thoughts get
thought-to man [zu Gedacht:] and indeed only when he is in
his proper devotion [Andacht:] i.e. in practical readiness for
thinking which comes to meet him as what is to be
thought. 51
 Heidegger's Phenomenology 31
30 Irish Philosophical Journal

what draws away it points not so much towards what draws

What is the relation of this meditative thought to language? Obviously
away as into the withdrawal. The sign remains without
since it thinks the naming and manifesting power of language (i.e. the interpretation.5 5 -
open) this itself cannot be named yet it does not simply belong to the
sphere of the nameless. As the Teacher in the dialogue, Convezsation on
Heidegger then quotes from Holderlin:
a country Path About Thinking, says:
We are a sign that is not read
But is it really settled that there is the nameless at all?
We feel no pain, we almost have
There is much that we cannot say, but only because the Lost our tongue in foreign lands.5 6
name it has does not occur to us.5 2

This is precisely where Heidegger's thoughts on releasement deviate

from Zen Buddhism with which it is often compared.
53 While Zen
NOTES
experiences the detachment as a nameless state of pure emptiness,
Heidegger sees detachment as deeply tied in with language. As he says, 1. G. Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason, translated by D. Fernbach
the openness, the region [die Gegnet], is in fact tied to a naming: (London, 1979).
For in the region in which we stay everything is in best
2. Destruction of Reason, p. 4-94-.
order only if it has been no one's doing ••. because it is the
region of the word, which is answerable to itself alone.54-
3. ibid., p. 4-98.
Our thinking comes from out of the experience of our language. It is
4-. T. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, translated by K. Tarnowski
only by experiencing that experience that we are capable of effecting a
change in orientation which would make a dialogue with other cultures and F. Will (Evanston, Ill., 1973); and T. Adorno, Negative
Dialectics, translated by E.B. Ashton, (London, 1973), pp. 61-131-
possible--especially the inevitable dialogue with Eastern thought. It is as
if we cannot stay long with the experience of the open and are driven to
5. T. Adorno, AgaInst Epistemology, translated by W. Domingo
language--just as, in sein and zeit, authenticity consisted in recognizing
(Oxford, 1982), especially pp. 124- ff.
that inauthenticity governs most of our everyday dealings with the world.

Unfortunately there is not sufficient space here to develop the

6. See the very revealing remarks on rationalism and irrationalism in
sein und Zeit (hereafter sZ), pp. 135-136. The critique of logic is
differences between Heidegger's approach and the Zen teaching with
which it has so often been rather rashly compared. Heidegger's master found in SZ, section 35.
is Heraclitus not Dogen or Ikkyu. His releasement is always in a curious
relation with Bodenstandigkeit, with situatedness or rootedness, and it is
7. SZ,48-4-9.
a meditative thinking which is a form of remembering, of N memosyne,
8. SZ, 19 and SZ, 36.
rather than a sudden intuition of enlightenment. It is a thinking which is
3ware of its own arising in history--not in the sense that it is aware of
9. W. Richardson, Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought (The
something in the past but that the essential relationship to time in this
Hague, 1963).
meditation has changed so that this essence presents itself rather in the
form of possibility. It is a possibility, however, which must be thought in
10. See, for example, R. Kearney and J. O'Leary (eds), Heidegger et la
the manner which it gives itself as a withdrawal of disappearance:
question de Dieu (Paris, 1980).
What withdraws from us draws us along by its very
withdrawal .••. As we are drawing towards what withdraws, 11. 'My Way to Philosophy', in Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being,
we ourselves point towards it.... As he is pointing that way, ed. and trans. by J. Stambough (New York, 1972).
man is the pointer •.•• His essential being lies in being such a
pointer. Something which in itself, by its essential being, is 12. E. Levinas, in A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), The Phenomenology of Man
pointing, we call a sign. As he draws towards what and the Human Condition (Dordrecht, 1983), p. 155.
withdraws man is a sign. But since this sign points towards
 Heidegger's Phenomenology 33
32 Irish Philosophical Journal

13. J.-P. Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. by H. Barnes (New York, to him for moulding or distorting Greek thought and subsequent
Western thought.
1968).
II>. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by C. The reference is, of course, to perhaps the most famous passage of
the Seventh Letter where Plato says that those people who have
Smith (London, 1962), pp. xix--xx. written books on the subject on which Plato has devoted his life do
not understand the matter.
15. ibid., pp. 1>08-1>09.

16. For example, in Rules for the Direction of the Mind Descartes says
that the only mental operations which can arrive at knowledge are
two--intuition and deduction:
By intuition understand, not the fluctuating
testimony of the senses, nor the misleading
judgement that proceeds from the blundering
constructions of imagination, but the conception
which an unclouded and attentive mind gives us so
readily and distinctly that we are wholly freed from
doubt about that which we understand. Or, what
comes to the same thing, intuition is the undoubting
conception of an unclouded and attentive mind, and
springs from the light of reason alone; it is more
certain than deduction itself.
Such writers can in my opinion have no real
acquaintance with the matter. I certainly have
composed no work in regard to it, nor do I intend to
do so in the future, for there is no way of putting it
in words like other studies. Acquaintance with it
comes rather after a long period of attendance on
instruction in the matter itself (to pragma auto) and
of close companionship, when suddenly like a blaze
kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul
and at once becomes self-sustaining (3l>lc-d,
translated by L.A. Post).
Here he sees that die Sache is experienced by an attendance which
is silent, and by analogy the kind of wealth that can be gained by
phenomenological attention to it need not be articulable in words.

The philosophical Works of Descartes, Volume I, trans. Haldane and 26. M. Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 61>.
Ross, p. 7. 27. ibid., p. 61>.
17. See, for example, Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation,
28. ibid., p. 65.
trans. by G. Etzkorn (The Hague, 1973), p. 3.

That is, what Husserl calls the original self-evidence, which must 29. ibid., p. 66.
18.
be on hand if predicative judgement is to be possible: Husserl,
Experience and Judgment(London, 1973), p. 20.
30. ibid., p. 55.

See M. Heidegger, On Time and Being (New York, 1972), p. 63. 31. H.-G. Gadamer, 'Heidegger and Marburg Theology', in D.E. Linge
19. (ed.), philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley, 1977), p. 198.
20. J. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. by D.B. Allison
32. M. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. by P. Hart, (New
(Evanston, Ill., 1973), pp. 7-8.
York, 197]).
21. ibid., p. 8. 33. M. Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 76.
22. H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. by W. Glen-Doepel,
edited by J. Cumming and G. Barden (London, 1975), p.1>91. 31>. ibid., p. 79.

35. W. Richardson, Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought (The

23. ibid., p. 1>91>. Hague, 1963).
21>. M. Heidegger, On Time and Being, op. cit., p. 61>.
36. M. Heidegger, Basic Writings, trans. & ed. by D. F. Krell, (London,
It is worth following up the reference because Plato is not often 1978), p. 351.
25.
cited by Heidegger despite the importance that Heidegger ｡ｳｩｧｮｾ＠
r

34 Irish Philosophical Journal Heidegger's Phenomenology 35

37. Sein und Zeit, p. 22. of Origin in 50to Zen and Meister Eckhart', The Thomist, 42 (1978),
281-312.
38. M. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays, ed. and trans. by W. Lovitt (New York, 1977), pp. 40-41. 54. Discourse on Thinking, p. 71.

39. ibid., p. 158. 55. Basic Writings, ed. by D.F. Krell (London, 1978), pp. 350-351.

40. M. Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 66. 56. ibid.

41. ibid.
42. Translated by J. Anderson and E. Hans Freund as Martin
Heidegger: Discourse on Thinking (New York, 1966).

43. Translated by J. Glenn Gray as What is Called Thinking? (New

York, 1968).
44. Translated in T. Sheehan (ed.), Heidegger: The Man and Thinker
(Chicago, 198 I).
45. E. Husser!, Ideas, translated by \'\1 .R. Boyce Gibson, (London, 1962),
pp. 109 ff.
46. M. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, op. cit., p. 68.

47. ibid., p. 80.

48. See J.D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought
(,'\ thens, Ohio, 1978); and R. Schurmann, 'Trois penseurs de
delaissement: Maitre Eckhart, Heidegger, et Suzuki', Journal of
the History of philosophy, 12 (1974), 455-478.

49. M. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 81.

50. ibid., p. 80.

5!. M. Heidegger, Heraklit, ed. by Manfred Frings, Gesamtausgabe
(Frankfurt-am-Main, 1979), LV, 187. See also M. Zimmerman,
'Heidegger and Heraclitus on Spiritual Practice', philosophy Today
(1983),87-105.

52. Discourse on Thinking, p. 70 •

.53. See, for example, Wei-hsun Fu, 'Heidegger and Zen on Being and
Nothingness: A Critical Essay in Transmetaphysical Dialectics', in
Buddhist and Western philosophy: A Critical Study (New Delhi,
1978); J. Mehta, 'A Western Kind of Rislu', in Erinnerung an Martin
Heidegger, J. Steffney, 'Man and Being in Heidegger and Zen
Buddhism', Philosophy Today, 25 (1981); R. Schurmann, 'The Loss